In 1948, the U.S.S.R. began a global campaign of illegal whaling
that lasted for three decades and, together with the poorly managed
"legal" whaling of other nations, seriously depleted whale
populations. Although the general story of this whaling has been told
and the catch record largely corrected for the Southern Hemisphere,
major gaps remain in the North Pacific. Furthermore, little attention
has been paid to the details of this system or its economic context.

Using interviews with former Soviet whalers and biologists as well
as previously unavailable reports and other material in Russian, our
objective is to describe how the Soviet whaling industry was structured
and how it worked, from the largest scale of state industrial planning
down to the daily details of the ways in which whales were caught and
processed, and how data sent to the Bureau of International Whaling
Statistics were falsified.

Soviet whaling began with the factory ship Aleut in 1933, but by
1963 the industry had a truly global reach, with seven factory fleets
(some very large). Catches were driven by a state planning system that
set annual production targets. The system gave bonuses and honors only
when these were met or exceeded, and it frequently increased the
following year's targets to match the previous year's
production; scientific estimates of the sustainability of the resource
were largely ignored. Inevitably, this system led to whale populations
being rapidly reduced. Furthermore, productivity was measured in gross
output (weights of whales caught), regardless of whether carcasses were
sound or rotten, or whether much of the animal was unutilized.

Whaling fleets employed numerous people, including women (in one
case as the captain of a catcher boat). Because of relatively high
salaries and the potential for bonuses, positions in the whaling
industry were much sought-after. Catching and processing of whales was
highly mechanized and became increasingly efficient as the industry
gained more experience. In a single day, the largest factory ships could
process up to 200 small sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus; 100
humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae; or 3035 pygmy blue whales,
Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda. However, processing of many animals
involved nothing more than stripping the carcass of blubber and then
discarding the rest. Until 1952, the main product was whale oil; only
later was baleen whale meat regularly utilized.

Falsified data on catches were routinely submitted to the Bureau of
International Whaling Statistics, but the true catch and biological data
were preserved for research and administrative purposes. National
inspectors were present at most times, but, with occasional exceptions,
they worked primarily to assist fulfillment of plan targets and
routinely ignored the illegal nature of many catches.

In all, during 40 years of whaling in the Antarctic, the U.S.S.R.
reported 185,778 whales taken but at least 338,336 were actually killed.
Data for the North Pacific are currently incomplete, but from
provisional data we estimate that at least 30,000 whales were killed
illegally in this ocean. Overall, we judge that, worldwide, the U.S.S.R.
killed approximately 180,000 whales illegally and caused a number of
population crashes. Finally, we note that Soviet illegal catches
continued after 1972 despite the presence of international observers on
factory fleets.

At the Tenth Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals
in November of 1993, Alexey Yablokov (then Special Advisor for Ecology
and Health to Russian President Boris Yeltsin) revealed that the Soviet
Union had conducted a vast global campaign of illegal whaling that began
in 1948 and lasted three decades (Yablokov, 1994). Yablokov described
how the U.S.S.R., while in theory bound by the International Convention
for the Regulation of Whaling, 1946 to which it was a signatory, had
swept the seas in search of whales, routinely disregarding quotas,
prohibitions, and other regulations established by the International
Whaling Commission (IWC). In general, violations took three forms: the
taking of protected species, altering of reported biological data to
camouflage catches of under-sized animals or lactating females, and
over-reporting of "legal" species to provide credible catch
totals.

Although some uncertainty remains about the true number of the
U.S.S.R.'s catches during this period, the difference between what
was actually caught and what was reported to the IWC1 was large (Clapham
and Ivashchenko, 2009). These catches, together with the poorly
regulated whaling of other nations, drastically reduced the populations
concerned, and in at least one case (that of the eastern population of
the North Pacific right whale, Eubalaena japonica), may have
irreversibly damaged a population's chance of recovery.

In the years following Yablokov's revelation, various papers
have provided the details of these illegal catches. Due largely to the
efforts of some Soviet biologists who had preserved formerly secret
materials from that period, most of the falsified data for the extensive
Soviet whaling operations in the Southern Hemisphere have now been
replaced with true catch numbers (Yablokov, 1995; Zemsky et al., 1995,
1996; Yablokov et al., 1998; Mikhalev, 2000, 2004; Clapham and Baker,
2002). Attempts have also been made to correct the record for the North
Pacific (Yablokov and Zemsky, 2000), but this remains incomplete and
large gaps exist for some species. (2)

The general story of Soviet illegal whaling has now been told by a
number of authors (Yablokov et al., 1998; Ivashchenko et al., 2007;
Berzin, 2008; Clapham and Ivashchenko, 2009). However, with the
exception of some information in a posthumously published memoir by the
Soviet whale biologist Alfred Berzin (2008), there has been little
recounting of the details of Soviet whaling operations, or of the
economic context in which this industry operated. Here, we use available
published material (primarily in Russian) together with extensive
interviews of former Soviet biologists and whalers to describe how the
Soviet whaling industry was structured and how it worked, from the
largest scale of state industrial planning down to the daily details of
the ways in which whales were caught and processed by the factory
fleets, and how the crews of these fleets were managed and paid. We also
describe the method by which catch data were falsified in reports to the
IWC.

Materials and Methods

Our objectives were to understand the primary mechanisms of the
Soviet industrial planning system and their application to the whaling
industry, and to investigate the details of how whaling was conducted.
This required a review of materials that are primarily in Russian,
including books and the formerly secret scientific, production, and
inspection reports of the whaling industry, as well as information
available on various websites devoted to whales or whaling in Russia and
Ukraine. We also reviewed Soviet reports to the IWC. However, the
majority of information was derived from interviews, as described below.

Interviews

Extensive information about Soviet whaling was gathered from
interviews with a number of individuals who had formerly held positions
in the Soviet whaling industry. These included scientists as well as
former captains or other crew members of whaling vessels and (in one
case) an artist who had been assigned to a shore whaling station in the
Kuril Islands. The interviews covered a variety of topics ranging from
everyday operations and working conditions to submission of catch
reports and dealings with the Ministries and administration; they also
included personal details of the interviewees' lives and careers.
The full interviews will be published separately, but brief biographies
of the major interviewees are given below.

Vyacheslav Alexseevich Zemsky, Ph.D., born in 1919, worked as a
whale biologist aboard the factory ships Aleut, Slava, and Yuriy
Dolgorukiy, starting in 1946. For many years, Zemsky worked in the VNIRO
(3) laboratory in Moscow and in AtlantNIRO (the Kaliningrad branch of
VNIRO), studying whales and seals. He was one of the first Soviet
scientists to propose that the pygmy blue whale is a separate species
(although today it is considered a subspecies, Balaenoptera musculus
brevicauda). He is one of the leading marine mammal scientists in the
former Soviet Union; Zemsky participated in the disclosure of true data
for the Soviet catches and was a coauthor of a number of papers on that
topic. He now lives in Moscow and was interviewed in April 2008.

Dmitriy Dmitrievich Tormosov, Ph.D. , born in 1937, worked as both
a biologist and a national whaling inspector aboard the factory ships
Yuriy Dolgorukiy, Slava, and Sovetskaya Rossia at various times between
1961 and 1974. Tormosov kept more than 57,000 individual catch records
(so-called "whale passports," see below), primarily from the
Yuriy Dolgorukiy fleet, and these have been used to construct an
extensive true catch record for Soviet whaling in the Southern
Hemisphere. Tormosov has published or coauthored many papers on Soviet
whaling statistics or the biology of whales. He lives in Kaliningrad,
Russia, but was interviewed for this study in Odessa in October 2008.

Nikolai Doroshenko, Ph.D., born in 1938, started his work as a
marine biologist on board the whaling factory ship Vladivostok in 1963
in the North Pacific. In various years until 1975 he participated in
scientific studies on the Dalniy Vostok, Vladivostok, and Sovetskaya
Rossia. For many years he worked in the TINRO laboratory (the Pacific
branch of VNIRO in Vladivostok). He was on board when Soviet fleets were
working in the Gulf of Alaska and in the southeastern Bering Sea, and he
later revealed the truth about the Soviet operations in these areas,
notably with regard to the fleets' destruction of North Pacific
right whales. He retired from his position in TINRO and still lives in
Vladivostok. He was interviewed in St. Petersburg in September 2006 and
again in Vladivostok in November 2009 and May 2011.

Grigori Georgievich Derviz, born in 1930, is an artist who in 1955
worked as a research assistant on the land whaling station at Paramushir
in the Kuril Islands. Although he subsequently became a highly respected
artist (and a member of the Russian Academy of Arts), Derviz had a great
interest in biology, and spent much of his time at Paramushir making
drawings and paintings of whales and the whaling process, and of the men
and women who worked there. He was interviewed at his home in Moscow in
October 2008 and again in November 2009.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Other minor details of whaling operations were obtained from
interviews with former whalers (primarily in Vladivostok), but these are
not listed individually here. (4)

Results and Discussion

Soviet Whaling: Origins and Global Expansion

Commercial whaling by the U.S.S.R. had its origin in 1932 with the
conversion of the American cargo vessel Glen Ridge into a 5,055 gross
ton (GT) whaling factory ship which was renamed Aleut (Zenkovich, 1954;
Berzin, 2008). (5) The Aleut (Fig. 1), together with three steam catcher
boats, began whaling operations in 1933, initially hunting the
then-abundant baleen and sperm whales, Physeter macrocephalus, in the
coastal waters of Kamchatka and Chukotka. In 1946, after the end of the
Second World War, the U.S.S.R. added a second factory ship and began
operations on baleen and sperm whales in the rich whaling grounds of the
Antarctic6; this was the Slava7, which at 12,639 GT was bigger than the
Aleut and attended by a larger fleet (8) of between 8 and 15 catchers
(Anonymous, 1954; Bulkeley, 2010). Also at this time (from 1948), the
Soviet Union began to use five former Japanese land whaling stations
along the Kuril Islands, with catchers that were converted World War II
American corvettes (Fig. 2).

Additional expansion of the whaling industry did not occur until
1959 when, during three consecutive seasons (1959-61), the Soviets added
a new factory ship each year to their Antarctic operations; these
included two large, purpose-built sister ships, Sovetskaya Ukraine and
Sovetskaya Rossia, as well as the Yuri Dolgorukiy, which was a converted
passenger liner. The Sovetskaya Ukraine and the Sovetskaya Rossia
(32,024 and 33,154 GT, respectively) were the largest whaling factory
ships ever built. Finally in 1963, two new large factory ships named the
Vladivostok and the Dalniy Vostok were added to pelagic whaling
operations in the North Pacific. Thus, Soviet whaling expanded from its
modest coastal beginnings with the Aleut in 1933 to a global operation
encompassing seven factory fleets and several land stations, across much
of the world's oceans. Details of each whaling fleet or land
station, including its years and areas of operation, are given in Table
1.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Soviet Industrial Planning: The Target Plan System and Its
Application to the Soviet Whaling Industry

Soviet whaling was a government-owned and government-controlled
industry. (9) In the beginning, the Ministry of Food and Light Industry
was responsible for licensing, enforcement of laws and regulations,
prosecutions, and all communication activities related to whaling by the
U.S.S.R. (IWC, 1953). Later, a separate Ministry of Fisheries was
established and put in charge of the fishing and whaling industries. As
with everything in the U.S.S.R., whaling was based upon a system of
production targets set by the industrial plans created by the State
Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers (Gosplan (10)). These
targets defined bonuses (as well as privileges, awards, and other
recognition) in the system. The responsibilities of the State Planning
Committee were described by Sysoev (1974) as follows:

"Gosplan is in charge of long-term and current planning on a
national scale, and it also controls the progress made in the fulfilment
of economic plans, especially with regard to the main indicators, and
prepares measures to avoid the emergence of disproportions."
(11,12)

Industrial plans set 5-year, 1-year, and monthly production
targets. Upon meeting these targets (monthly, and at the end of the
season each year), workers would receive a 25% bonus above their regular
salary; exceeding the target by 20% would increase the bonus to 60% of
the workers' pay. This created an obvious and strong incentive for
catching more whales. Furthermore, because of this system (and the fact
that fleet workers were provided free food for months at a time),
whaling potentially paid among the highest salaries of any industry. As
a result, employment was very competitive, and it was difficult to
obtain a position in the fleets.

Salary bonuses were calculated based upon monthly production. For
example, if workers exceeded the monthly target in January by 20-60% but
did not meet the target in February, they would receive their bonus for
only 1 month. As a result, whalers would not slow their pace of work
even if they had had a very productive time at the beginning of the
season. If the overall total for the entire season exceeded target
thresholds, an additional bonus was paid.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The system of plan targets worked in different ways. A 5-year
target was set at the beginning of the period and would not be changed,
but a new 1-year target would be set annually; how this target was
calculated varied considerably from year to year. In some instances, the
new year's target would be based upon 100% of the previous
year's productivity; an example involving the Sovetskaya Rossia
fleet is given below. In other years, targets were increased but at a
lower rate, and without any obvious connection with the whaling results
of the previous year. In the Soviet fishing industry, targets were
frequently set by taking the actual average Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE)
for the present year and multiplying it by the number of vessels in the
fleet (Sysoev, 1974); it is likely that a similar system was sometimes
used to calculate whaling targets (with catcher CPUE as the metric), but
we cannot be certain.

However targets were calculated, the result was that, in order to
receive a bonus (at least in the years prior to depletion of
populations), the whalers had to kill more whales than in the previous
year to meet the new target. A simplified scheme of targets and bonuses
is illustrated in Figure 3. The actual system was considerably more
complicated. Multiple targets were set, involving not only the number of
whales to be killed, but also gross output, as well as a list of
specific products; examples from two factory fleets are given in Table
2. Meeting or exceeding these various targets led to additional bonuses.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

We could find only one instance in which a Soviet whaling fleet
exceeded the yearly catch or gross output targets by 20% (the Dalniy
Vostok fleet obtained 121% of their allotted target in the 1967 season),
which would have triggered a 60% salary bonus (Fig. 3); however, we
examined reports from only the North Pacific together with a few
Sovetskaya Rossia reports for the Antarctic.

A consequence of this system was that, because the initial 5-year
target remained unchanged, whalers could, by exceeding each year's
annual target, attain catches that were several times the 5-year target.
Such success was routinely reported with great fanfare in the Soviet
media, and factory ships themselves would sometimes advertise this on
returning to port at the end of a season (Fig. 4). In terms of the
exploitation of the resource, however, the result of catches that
increased every year was that the whaling rapidly became unsustainable.

Catch setting, and use of natural resources generally, was supposed
to be based upon scientific assessments and rational management, as
explained in an exposition of the socialist economy and its basis
(Sysoev, 1974):

"Science is one of the main features of planning ... Many
scientific institutions in the U.S.S.R. participate in the solution of
the problems facing the planned development of the socialist
economy."

The same publication has a chapter entitled "Measures to
safeguard fish stocks," and this discusses the main tasks of the
Principal Administration for the Preservation and Reproduction of Fish
Stocks, and the regulations (overseen by the Ministry of Fisheries) of
fishing and other marine resource exploitation, including whaling. These
tasks included:

"To safeguard fish stocks, work out and implement measures to
reproduce and regulate fisheries in the water bodies of the U.S.S.R....
To draw up proposals for limits on catches of valuable commercial fishes
[and] marine animals ... coordinating them with the relevant main
administrations of the Ministry of Fisheries of the U.S.S.R., research
institutes and organizations of the fishing industry, and submitting
them for approval."

Despite this, in reality exploitation of marine resources was based
almost entirely upon economics or the ambitions of officials. The
opinions of scientists (who were required to analyze whale population
dynamics and recommend sustainable catch levels) were routinely and
usually completely ignored.

For example, the Ministry of Fisheries gave a target for gross
output for the 1961-62 season of Sovetskaya Rossia as 128,500 tons;
actual results for that season were 141,938.6 tons (exceeding the target
by 10.4%). The following season the target for gross-output was set as
138,150 tons, with an actual production of 153,985.4 tons (exceeding the
new target by 11.5%). In both seasons the target was exceeded because of
whaling success in the North Pacific; as a result, the Sovetskaya
Rossia's production target for this area was doubled, from 12,320
tons in 1962 to 24,150 tons in 1963.

Routine inflation of targets was exacerbated by other factors. For
example, in years in which certain important national events were
celebrated (which was frequently: e.g. the anniversary of the October
revolution, the 130-year anniversary of Bellingshausen's trip to
Antarctica (13), etc.), whalers would usually make a counter-proposal to
increase their allotted targets by some amount of product. Alexei
Solyanik (1952), the infamous and most successful whaling fleet
commander of all (Sakhnin, 1965; Berzin, 2008), wrote in his description
of Slava's first five seasons in the Antarctic:

"Soviet whalers named the fifth Antarctic season after Stalin.
In their letter to Comrade Stalin, the crew of the fleet committed
themselves to exceeding the target plan for whale oil by 30 thousand
poods (14)."

In contrast, failure to meet targets was punished. In addition to
potentially not receiving a bonus, under-performing captains or other
officers could be demoted, and workers rated poorly would not be rehired
the following season. Furthermore, the teams or individuals deemed
responsible for compromising production were sometimes named in reports.
Here is a quotation from the production report of the whaling fleet
Vladivostok for the 1965 season (Anonymous, 1965a), commenting on the
poor output of two catcher boats:

"The failure to meet the monthly target [for May] by the
catcher Vliyatel'niy was related to poor coordination between
Captain V. I. Klepikov and the harpooner G. N. Stasenko, and also
neglecting of teamwork. The failure to meet the target on the part of
Robkiy can be explained solely by the neglect and passiveness of the
crew."

Likewise, the production report of the whaling fleet Dalniy Vostok
for the 1965 season (Anonymous, 1965b) berates the harpooners of two
catchers, but also points to a more systemic problem:

"The catchers Velichaviy and Vazniy did not meet their monthly
target. Both vessels had a deficit mainly because of poor work by the
harpooners ... During June the catches often exceeded the processing
ability of the factory ship and this led to catchers losing time waiting
for carcass delivery, and a long holding time for the whale carcasses
before processing. Because of the reasons described above, less than
half of the whale products were able to be frozen and that resulted in
the monthly target of frozen products not being met."

In fact, such wastage was a common problem in Soviet whaling. One
specific and rather confusing parameter of the plan targets was that
productivity was calculated in gross output and not in final (net)
products. The reason for this lay within the Ministry's reporting
system; the whaling industry was placed together with the fisheries
industry and their annual reports were reviewed together using the same
system of evaluation. The problem was that gross output in fisheries
(measured as the weight of whole fish) is similar or almost equal to the
final net product output (the weight of processed fish). This is not the
case for whaling, where much or most of the huge bulk of each whale was
discarded. Yet this system allowed whalers to record catches (and
therefore production) as the total calculated weight of all whales
caught, rather than the amount of product produced. (15)

In reality, the actual amount of products that were processed was a
secondary goal. The net production depended upon the condition of the
whale (from fresh to rotten) when it was brought back to the factory
ship. Capture of large whales (such as blue whales, Balaenoptera
musculus, and fin whales, B. physalus) would yield very large production
numbers, even if the amount of products actually processed from them
might be low. Further details of processing and the use of different
parts of whales are described below.

Target plans for each fleet were set individually. In addition,
there was a competition between the fleets for the largest catch during
each season. All these factors drove Soviet whalers to kill more and
more whales, notably as they gained more experience, and as new and
larger factory ships were introduced. Indeed, to have "the largest
in the world" for everything was a major characteristic of Soviet
political mentality, and this was manifest in the whaling industry in
the building of the huge Sovetskaya Ukraina and S. Rossia. This was
originally meant to demonstrate the superiority of communism over
capitalism with the ability of "free" people to attain great
results; in reality it resulted in factories, farms, ships, institutes,
and other entities that were designed and built with the primary goal of
being the largest in the world, with efficiency and sustainability often
being, at best, a secondary afterthought.

In summary, the Soviet planning system--and calculation of
production targets--was in theory based upon principles of sustainable
use and scientific recommendations or assessment of resources, and this
represented one of many prominent claims by the U.S.S.R. in the
political war against capitalism. In reality it devolved into an
unregulated system which, for many industries, consumed natural
resources with considerable waste (Ericson, 1991; Berzin, 2008). This
was exacerbated by the fact that its output was not based upon genuine
economic needs or national demand, nor was it constrained by the need to
show profits.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Structure of the Soviet Whaling Fleets

The Aleut was the first Soviet whaling factory ship, and was a
relatively small operation. However, beginning with the Slava in 1946,
Soviet factory ships became larger, with larger fleets of faster and
more powerful catcher vessels (Fig. 5). This capital expansion required
more workers, larger plan targets, and more whales. The selection of
workers was very rigorous, and most positions were very competitive.
There were requirements of good health and experience; in addition,
other characteristics were important, such as being a communist or
politically active, married with a family, and having no criminal or any
other compromising records. At the same time, Soviet industry (including
whaling) was quite progressive in that it employed significant numbers
of women (see below).

While at a minimum the factory fleets required enough people to
perform the main job (killing and processing enough whales to meet and
exceed plan targets), each Soviet factory ship was in effect a small
country away from the homeland. Each fleet had many subdivisions to
support various aspects of the industry, and this resulted in an overall
crew complement that was large. The two largest factory ships, the
Sovetskaya Ukraina and the Sovetskaya Rossia, each had about 560 people
on board, not including the crews of the catchers (some 25-31 seamen for
each), making in total more than a thousand people in each fleet.

Among the divisions of the fleet were the whaling departments
themselves, which included the processing teams and blubber boiling
factory staff, as well as workers responsible for storage. Then there
was the chemistry lab, and operation of the galley and laundry. In
addition, each fleet had a newspaper printed on board (Fig. 6)16, a
school, a library, a cinema and an accountants office, as well as a
large command group.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

A notable feature of Soviet whaling fleets was the presence on
board of a relatively large number of women. They served not only as
cooks and laundry workers, but also as scientists, radio operators and,
in one case, even the captain of a catcher. This latter individual was
Valentina Yakovlevna Orlikova, who commanded the catcher Storm during
1947-53; in 1943 Orlikova was prominently featured in Soviet propaganda
for her previous posting as an officer in the merchant marine (Fig. 7).
(17)

Scientists were present on all but one of the factory ships: the
Aleut did not have a scientific group for a number of years because of a
shortage of trained whale biologists in the Vladivostok laboratory,
which was supplying scientists to three other whaling fleets from the
same home port. The Kuril land whaling stations had scientists from the
Moscow institutes only periodically.

Overall the position of scientists on board was widely viewed by
other crew members as useless with regard to the end result of
production, and science was tolerated largely because, in the words of
biologist Dmitriy Tormosov, "Everyone else had science, so we
should too" (personal commun., October, 2008).

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

The command system on Soviet whaling fleets was quite complicated.
Each fleet was led by a group of five people. The overall command of the
fleet lay with the Captain-Director. Next in rank was a Commissar
(political officer), followed by a First Vice-Captain (or Relief
Captain) who was responsible for directing and overseeing whale catches.
There was also a Vice-Captain in charge of whale processing and
production, and a Chief Engineer. Each factory ship had an additional
special post termed the "Engineer of Whaling." This man was
responsible for plotting the daily positions of the catchers and whale
catches on a map, and organizing the collection of whale carcasses to be
brought back to the factory ship for processing. At the end of the
whaling season, the Engineer of Whaling was primarily responsible for
falsifying catch data (see below).

A national whaling inspector was present on each factory ship to
(in theory) oversee the enforcement of whaling laws and regulations
(e.g. the prohibitions on taking undersized whales, lactating females,
or protected species); this was required under the International
Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946, to which the U.S.S.R. was
a signatory. The inspection system is discussed further below.

Salaries

The salary system in the fisheries industry of the Soviet Union was
quite complex. In a textbook for universities, Sysoev (1974) described
details of the system, which was developed in the 1950's to:

"differentiate and regulate the level of wages of different
groups and categories of workers, depending on the quality of their
labor, working conditions, and skills, as well as on the specific
features and importance of the various industrial branches and
enterprises, and on their disposition."

In the whaling industry, each person earned a basic salary based
upon his or her qualifications and position. However, this salary could
be increased, notably through a system of regional wage coefficients;
these multiplied the salary by a coefficient depending on where the
fleet was working, the underlying logic being that work was harder in
some areas than others. For the Antarctic below latitude (lat.)
40[degrees]S the coefficient was 2.0. For North Pacific regions it
varied from 1.6 to 2.0: for north of the Bering Strait, as well as the
Kuril and Commander Islands the coefficient was 2.0, while it was 1.8
for Kamchatka and northern Sakhalin, and 1.6 for southern Sakhalin
(Sysoev, 1974). The catchers associated with a whaling fleet regularly
operated at a considerable distance from the factory ship, sometimes 200
nmi or more away; in some cases, this could actually put them in a
different wage zone for a day (e.g. if they ventured north of lat.
40[degrees]S). As a result, for the purpose of paying salaries, the
daily position of the factory ship was used for the entire fleet. Once
the factory ship was below lat. 40[degrees]S, this would result in an
increase in everyone's salary, regardless of where they might
otherwise be. The higher coefficient, as well as the potential for
production bonuses, was the reason most of the seamen wanted to go
quickly to the Antarctic without any delay in areas north of lat.
40[degrees]S.

Additional bonuses were based on monthly individual/team production
and depended on the number of whales caught, the amount of oil produced,
the number of whales processed, etc. The basic bonuses for meeting or
exceeding the plan target applied to everyone in the fleet, but certain
other bonuses related to specific elements of production were not given
to scientists, or to other workers not involved in the actual catching
and processing of whales. Whaling inspectors, however, would receive all
types of bonuses. Salaries were calculated and reported to whalers
weekly or monthly, and were paid every month to the families at home
(Kotlyar, 1952).

The Whaling Process

A detailed description of the process of Soviet whaling and the
research conducted on whales can be found in a number of Soviet
publications, primarily from the early period of the industry
(Arsen'ev and Zemskiy, 1951; Kotlyar, 1952; Zenkovich, 1954;
Sleptsov, 1955; Solyanik, 1956). Not surprisingly, these descriptions
omit all mention of the illegal aspects of the whaling. Instead, one
finds many stories about the heroic hard work and dedication of many
people working together to meet a target plan and to help the homeland
with critically important products from the whales that they killed;
this aspect of whaling was publicized widely both inside and outside the
Soviet Union. Below, we describe the details of the whaling itself.

Killing and Towing Whales

Once in the whaling area, catchers would often form a front
spreading out in a line with a distance between two catchers of about
8-10 nmi; this was based on the assumption that one catcher could see
whales within a radius of about 10 nmi. Once this front was formed, the
catchers would begin to search. They would be in radio contact with the
factory ship and usually with each other, keeping the fleet captain
fully aware of catcher actions and results. This way each fleet would
cover a large area in a very efficient way. (18) When whales were found,
catchers would begin the hunt, with multiple vessels sometimes
converging on an area where whales were concentrated.

For each catch, the catcher crew (or scientist if one was aboard)
filled out the front side of a special document called a "whale
passport" (Fig. 8). This logged the number of the passport, the
date, catcher's name, harpooner's name, time the hunt (chase)
began, whale species, position and time of the kill, approximate
distance to the factory ship, behavior of the whale during the hunt,
number of whales seen in the beginning and if possible the direction of
their movements, the presence of plankton patches (shape, size, and
color), presence of other animals (species and number of birds, seals),
beginning time that the whale was under tow, time of delivery to the
factory ship, and any additional comments from the captain or harpooner.
Not all of the details were filled out every time, but a suite of
essential data was required.

Killed whales were either put "on flag" for later pick-up
(a pole with a flag was inserted into the carcass, which had been
inflated with compressed air to prevent it from sinking; Fig. 9), or
were immediately towed by the catcher. Whenever a whale was put "on
flag" its position and some other details of wind and current
direction would be reported to the factory ship to enable its subsequent
recovery by either a "tag boat" or by one of the catchers
themselves at the end of the day. One or two of the catchers would
usually help the tag boat to collect killed whales. Very few flagged
whales were lost, since this would result in a loss of productivity.

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

Much of the time, catchers would commonly be spread over a large
area and could range as far as 200 nmi from the factory ship (or even
more in extreme cases). A "front" of 20 catchers could be
spread out over 200 nmi, especially in areas where there was no prior
information on whale distribution. However, towing a whale back to the
factory ship from a long distance resulted in many whales arriving
already rotten, and thus unsuitable for processing. When catchers could
not find many whales near the factory ship, one of the catchers would be
sent searching for other aggregations of whales, ranging up to 600 nmi
away (Kotlyar, 1952).

Competition between catchers and fleets, as well as the need to
fulfill monthly targets, forced catchers to continue hunting, even in
bad weather. After the first few years of Soviet whaling, catchers
reportedly could be found hunting whales in poor weather conditions,
thus maintaining high catches when foreign fleets might return with
unfulfilled quotas (Kotlyar, 1952). The same incentive inevitably
resulted in Soviet catchers being encouraged to take whale species that
were illegal to hunt (such as southern and North Pacific right whales,
as well as gray, Eschrichtius robustus; bowhead, Balaena mysticetus;
and, later, blue and humpback whales) and later also to hunt other
baleen and sperm whales outside permitted seasons, areas, or quotas (see
also the Appendix).

Processing

The butchering (flensing) process was very organized and efficient,
and sometimes a staggering number of whales were processed in a 24-h
period. The processing deck of each factory ship (Fig. 10) was divided
into two parts. The rear processing deck was dedicated to stripping a
whale of its blubber and removing the lower jaw and tongue. After being
hauled up the stern slipway of the factory ship (Fig. 11), a whale would
first be placed on the rear deck and the blubber rapidly removed
(typically in 10-12 min, Kotlyar, 1952). While the carcass underwent
this initial processing, the second side of the whale
"passport" was filled in, mainly by scientists, who recorded
the number of the whale (assigned in order from the beginning of the
whaling season), the date and time the whale was hauled onto the
processing deck, sex, length, blubber thickness, presence of a fetus
and/or milk (for mature females), length and sex of a fetus, internal
and external parasites, fullness and contents of the stomach, and any
additional information of note.

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

At the same time, the whale was recorded in a journal (a registry
of catches) with similar but less detailed information; typically, this
was done by a seaman on the processing deck.

After initial processing, the whale was moved to the central part
of the processing deck. There, a separate flensing team separated the
head, cut off the meat, removed bones and internal organs, and put all
useful parts of the animal into boilers or into a line for processing
bone-meal.

The whole process of butchering a whale would take about 30 min
from beginning to end. One of the major drivers of such efficiency was
the "socialistic competition" which was found everywhere in
the Soviet Union, and in particular in the whaling industry.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

Beginning from the second season of the Slava, the fleet created
two flensing teams, operating in shifts of 12 h each. These teams
competed constantly with each other. At the end of a month or season one
team would be announced as the winner of the socialistic competition and
would receive a reward (typically a monetary bonus as well as honor).
The result of this competition was a constant increase in efficiency
during the early years: during the second season on the Slava each team
typically processed 8 to 12 whales per 12-h shift, but by fifth season
the two shifts could process up to 48 whales in 24 h (Kotlyar, 1952).

This is how P.A. Kotov (Kotlyar, 1952) described a notable day of
competition between flensing teams:

"On the 8th of March, International Women's Day, catchers
were reporting very large catches. 45 whales, 50 whales, finally 71
whales--the victorious results of the day. By 18:00 there were 25
carcasses already floating behind the factory ship and all four tag
boats were in line to deliver more whales ...

"Long before the beginning of work, all 53 flensers came
together on the sides of the ship to observe this ever-increasing number
of carcasses, and became eager to begin work, and to get the top ranking
[in their socialistic competition with the other shift]. Every 10-15
minutes a whale is smoothly lifted through the stern slip ... It is 6:00
am and the bleak fall sun shows above the horizon, and the shifts are
changing. The victorious results are announced: 25^ whale carcasses were
processed [by the first shift]. This established a new record for Slava
during all her years of work in the Antarctic ...

"At the beginning of the second shift there are still 20
whales by the stern slipway of the factory ship. This is a chance for
the other team to take the lead. The second shift is working with high
intensity, like a well-regulated mechanism but ... one of the tag boats
delayed their carcass delivery by 20 minutes and so by the end of the
shift at 18:00 there are 24V2. processed carcasses.... It will soon will
be the end of the whaling season and the first shift will become the
winner of the competition ..."

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

The processing capacity of a factory ship greatly depended upon the
species of whale concerned. In a single day on the huge Sovetskaya
Ukraina, the flensing teams could process up to 200 small sperm whales,
100 humpback whales, or 30-35 pygmy blue whales. (19)

After a whale was dismantled on the flensing deck, the next part of
the process involved the blubber-boiling factory, which had its own
competitions. Here, problems arose: when large numbers of whales were
killed, the flensing teams could not process all of them before they
turned rotten, or whales were sometimes delivered in an already-rotten
state due to extended towing. These whales were lifted on deck, and
measured and recorded (and thus were included in gross production
results). However, while the blubber was still often stripped and
processed, the rest of the whale was thrown overboard unused. Sometimes
carcasses were in such poor condition that after measuring they were
thrown overboard completely intact, without even the blubber taken from
them. In some periods, only the blubber was taken from even fresh
whales, because the storage space for bone-meal was already full, or if
there were too many carcasses awaiting processing. In such cases, even
large blue whales were stripped of blubber and thrown overboard. The
processes, machinery, and other technical equipment used by the Soviet
whaling industry are described in great detail for factory ships,
catchers, and cargo ships by Bodrov and Grigoriev (1963).

Whale Products

For many years, from 1933 until at least the end of 1952, the main
whaling product was whale oil. All whale meat was either boiled to
extract the oil or processed into fertilizer, with some amount reserved
for canning. Only later did Soviet whaling begin to utilize baleen whale
meat (frozen or canned) for human consumption. (20)

All bones were loaded into boilers to extract the oil or were
processed as bone-meal. A number of different products were made from
whales depending on the species and condition of the carcass. Baleen
whales that were processed fresh were used for human consumption as
frozen and canned meat, and oil used to make margarine. Sperm whales
were processed into industrial oil and bone-meal. In addition, medicinal
products were sometimes derived for use in the medical industry and in
hospitals. Whale liver was processed separately (it was typically salted
and stored) to extract vitamin A later. Some effort was made to develop
methods to extract hormones from the pancreas and other organs, but this
was never accomplished on an industrial scale.

Baleen whale products were destined largely for human consumption,
while the products taken from sperm whales were primarily consigned for
industrial use or animal food. As a result, after sperm whales were
processed, the regulations required all processing lines of the
blubber-boiling factory to be cleaned before any baleen whales were
processed. In later years, especially in the North Pacific, when the
number of baleen whales caught represented a small proportion of the
total catch (relative to sperm whales, the primary target) these
occasional mysticetes would be processed together with sperm whales for
bone-meal and industrial oil.

Whale oil and other products (except for meat, which was kept in
freezers) were stored in tanks; these huge reservoirs each had a
capacity of 500-600 GT. These tanks contained, at different times, fuel,
diesel, whale oil, bone-meal, water, or salted liver. They were
thoroughly washed before each change of contents. Periodically, a supply
tanker would arrive and all whale products were transhipped, thus
freeing up space for new whale products.

Whaling Fleet Mechanical Equipment

Overall, the Soviet whaling fleets represented a large capital
investment. Beginning with the Slava after World War II, each factory
fleet had modern equipment designed for catching and processing whales,
and this machinery was constantly modernized and improved to make all
aspects of the whaling process more efficient (Bodrov and Grigoriev,
1963). As a state-owned industry that was free from the pressure to
generate profits, the Soviet whaling industry could afford large capital
outlays; however, it became more difficult to justify such expenses
after catches dropped significantly in the early 1970's, and
stricter controls, reduced catch quotas, and greater inspection
requirements were finally established by the IWC.

Reporting

There was considerable bureaucracy involved with Soviet state
industries, and whaling was no exception. The whaling fleets were
required to produce many summary reports at the end of each season;
these included a scientific report, various production reports,
statistical reports, financial reports, reports on technological methods
and innovations, whaling inspection reports, injury and safety reports,
and reports on activities related to the work of the Communist Party.

Catch numbers given in the various reports for a single season of
one whaling fleet sometimes differ significantly. A good example
concerns reports for the Vladivostok fleet in 1968, which illegally
killed 127 bowhead whales in the Okhotsk Sea. The scientific report and
whaling inspector's report give the same numbers, including the 133
bowheads together with 182 fin whales and 37 sei whales; by contrast,
the production report does not mention bowheads at all, and instead
gives 260 fin whales and 106 sei whales. It is not clear why the
production reports sometimes include clearly falsified data; this was
apparently an attempt to cover up illegal catches, but this is odd given
that production reports (like everything else) were classified as
secret. In other cases (for example, the material we have examined for
the Sovetskaya Rossia fleet), catch numbers in all of the reports agree.

Transit and Foreign Ports

Soviet whaling cruises averaged 7-8 mo. The fleets working in the
Antarctic typically left their home ports in September or the beginning
of October, and returned in May. While in transit to the Antarctic, a
fleet would sometimes stop to whale illegally in the tropics. Examples
include the Sovetskaya Ukraina and the Slava, which left from Odessa on
the Black Sea and pursued a route through the Mediterranean and the Suez
Canal and on into the Red Sea; both fleets hunted humpbacks and other
whales in the Arabian Sea in 1965-66 (Mikhalev, 1997) before continuing
south to the Antarctic. During transit, everyone earned only their basic
salary, even if they were actually whaling; the salary coefficients
noted above applied only from the official start (as set by IWC
regulations) of the whaling season in the Antarctic.

When a fleet entered a foreign port, crew members were given shore
leave. However, they were divided into groups of three or four, with the
requirement that one of the members must be a Communist Party member or
an officer, who was responsible for ensuring that the crew members
behaved appropriately and did not attempt to defect. The overall intent
during such port visits was to portray Soviet people as orderly, happy,
friendly citizens of a great country. Bad behavior on shore was severely
punished. In extreme cases, the much-Coveted seaman's passport--the
document that allowed men and women to go to sea--would be taken away;
without this, one could not work on a ship, or earn the (relatively)
lucrative seaman's salary. On the return voyage at the end of the
whaling season, the crew would be instructed on how to respond if anyone
should ask how many whale catches had been made.

Science

Scientists were a regular part of the whaling fleet crew from the
inception of Soviet whaling. Beginning with the Aleut's operations
in the Far East, the scientific research goal was to discover whaling
areas that could support high catches. In addition, scientists were
employed to conduct research on the whales, their prey, and their
environment to better predict whale distribution and thus improve the
efficiency and results of the whaling endeavor. As noted earlier, whale
biologists were working on each factory ship, with a few exceptions.
There were also usually one or two oceanographers on board, and catcher
captains also collected data on weather and oceanography whenever
possible. Technicians working in the factory ship's chemistry lab
were charged with storing products derived from the processing of
whales, and analyzing their quality (e.g. the pH of whale oil and the
quality of this oil and of bone-meal).

In the daily regime, two whale biologists would alternate working
in 12-h shifts alongside the flensing teams. In addition to the primary
information recorded in the whaling journal on the processing deck, they
would collect detailed biological data, to be analyzed in studies of
population abundance, structure, and dynamics. Alone, or with an
assistant, they would take measurements of different parts of the
whale's body, cut out ear plugs (for age determination), measure
and preserve embryos, ovaries, and testes, and collect tissue samples
from other organs, as well as parasites and stomach contents. All this
information was initially recorded in a small field notebook, and at the
end of the shift the scientist would copy it into a scientific (whaling)
journal and ensure that all samples taken were clearly recorded.

Based on scientific journals and the whale passports (which were
transferred at the end of the season to the research institutes
concerned), scientists began to analyze the data on the return voyage
from the whaling grounds and prepared a scientific report of the voyage;
two or three copies of this were archived with the home institute and
with the Fisheries Ministry. According to the rules, whale passports
were kept only for a few months, until data analyses were complete and
reports were prepared; after this, they were destroyed (usually by
burning). As a result of this requirement, all of the original detailed
information was largely lost. The major exception was the retention of
more than 57,000 passports from the Yuriy Dolgorukiy factory fleet,
representing a complete record of 15 years of whaling. These were
secretly preserved by the biologist Dmitry Tormosov, who regarded the
destruction of this material as an unacceptable waste of original data.

The system of target setting was not without its critics. As noted
above, the recommendations of scientists with regard to the (lack of)
sustainability of high catch levels were routinely ignored when setting
production targets, and one can read the frustrations of some scientists
in some of the annual reports that they were required to produce.
Klumov, in his formerly secret preliminary report of the 1956 whaling
season (Klumov, 1956; Ivashchenko et al., 2007) says:

"I think that the whaling plan established for 1957 with a
target of 47,000 tons of raw products is overestimated and does not
reflect the real condition of whale populations in the area around the
Kuril Islands. The assumption that in 1957 the whaling fleet could take
2,000 whales is unrealistic for the industry working with whaling
products, and will force whaling ships to take whales that are not of
full value in terms of the business. (21) Statistics for the previous
years of whaling around the Kurils show that the number of full-value
sperm whales taken never reached 1,000 (not including 1952 and possibly
1956, for which we do not yet have complete data), but instead ranged
from 780 to 950 whales per year. In other words, all other important
details of our work are ignored. Evidently we have too great an
abundance of natural resources, so we can waste them and manage them so
poorly."

Another example comes from the combined report of the scientific
groups from the fleets Dalniy Vostok and Vladivostok for 1967 (Latishev
et al., 1967):

"At the current time, whaling in the northern waters of the
Pacific Ocean is going through a very difficult time. The resources
declined so dramatically in the last three years that the industry
already now has to cut back the production plan targets for catches.

"Mainly this situation relates to the catches of the most
preferable baleen whales. Despite some increase in the amount of catches
of baleen whales during the last [1967] season (8.7% of the total catch
in 1967 vs. 6.3% in 1966), this happened only because of large catches
of right and gray whales. In future seasons the percentage of baleen
whales in the catch would not exceed 5% (in number of animals) of the
total no matter what the effort.

"In particular, populations of blue and humpback whales are
greatly reduced, even though these whales were so numerous in the recent
past. The whaling value of a number of large areas has been completely
lost: the Gulf of Alaska, the Bering Sea and the waters around the
Aleutian islands.

"From 1964, the whaling focused its efforts completely on the
sperm whales that inhabit the Central and Western regions and around the
Kuril Islands. In these areas sperm whale groups consist primarily
(sometimes up to 95%) of females, the reproductive part of the
population that defines its abundance. Annually our whaling fleets kill
more than 10,000-12,000 of these kind of sperm whales, while the size of
the majority of them is below that allowed for whaling. In the 1967
season the number of undersized whales caught by the Dalniy Vostok and
Vladivostok fleets made up 72% and 86% of their total catch,
respectively. If one adds to that amount the number of illegal baleen
whales (right, gray, blue and humpback whales), and also small-sized sei
and fin whales, the picture of modern whaling appears in a very bad
light.

"This is only from the point of view of international law.
What about biological conclusions regarding the condition of exploited
populations?

"Analysis of biological data by scientific groups for a number
of years proves the poor condition of extremely depleted populations of
some species (right, blue, humpback) and predicts a similar future for
others (fin, sei and sperm whales)."

Such warnings notwithstanding, Soviet whaling continued apace,
often until populations were commercially exhausted.

Inspections and Falsification of Catch Data

As noted above, each whaling fleet was required by the IWC to carry
a national inspector whose job it was to enforce international
regulations. Within the Soviet whaling industry, the absurdity of this
inspection system lay in the way in which it was structured. The
inspector was appointed by the ministry in charge of whaling (initially
the Ministry of Food and Light Industry of the U.S.S.R. and later by the
Fisheries Ministry); as a result, even if he was not under the direct
command of the fleet captain, the whaling inspector was nonetheless
employed by the same agency which paid his salary, as well as those of
all the whalers.

Certainly, captains could create problems for any principled
inspector, who in doing his job properly would be at odds with the
crew's continual desire for bonuses; needless to say, it would not
be easy for an inspector to spend several months confined to a factory
ship in such a potentially hostile atmosphere (indeed, this is often a
fundamental weakness of all observer programs for whaling, fisheries, or
any similar industry). However, it is not clear whether inspectors ever
truly attempted to follow the IWC regulations, or whether they existed
solely so that the U.S.S.R. could claim to have fulfilled this
requirement, with no intention of true compliance.

There are examples of reports submitted by national inspectors at
the end of a whaling season where inspectors apparently attempted to
stop illegal whaling. For example, an inspector's report from 1968
noted that the Vladivostok fleet was hunting bowhead whales (a protected
species) in the Okhotsk Sea in September; the report notes that the
inspector cabled the ministry in Moscow to inform them of this
infraction, and requested that the captain leave the area. There was no
immediate response from the ministry, and the captain continued the
whaling for another two weeks until the ministry finally ordered him to
desist. The same report lists various other infractions, as well as the
fines levied by the ministry on captains and harpooners. However, the
fines concerned were relatively small: 869 whales were reported as
infractions (either undersized, protected species, or lactating
individuals), but only 91 fines were levied. These involved 21
individuals for a total of 1,540 roubles (approximately $3,700 at 1968
exchange rates, or an average of $176 per person). (22)

The whaling inspector together with the Engineer of Whaling was
responsible for writing reports on the season's results, which were
then sent to the ministry in Moscow. The need for large catches to meet
plan targets, and to provide the benefits and bonuses desired by
workers, conflicted in an obvious and fundamental way with the
U.S.S.R.'s obligations under the ICRW to follow the whaling
regulations established by the IWC. This was solved through falsified
reports, which gave catch totals that were lower than those actually
achieved. This reporting system is discussed further below, and a
summary of reported vs. actual catches for the Antarctic is given in
Table 3.

Although inspectors sometimes attempted to stop some illegal
whaling (as above), for the most part this seems not to have been the
case. Indeed, one inspector's report (that for the 1967 season of
the Dalniy Vostok fleet, extracts of which are reproduced here in the
Appendix) opens by stating the main duties of the inspection team, which
consisted of two contradictory objectives:

'The main task of the State Inspection [Department] was
assisting with fulfilment of the State plan targets for gross output and
specific products, and to decrease the number of violations of whaling
regulations."

The report notes that the fleet was ordered to enter the Okhotsk
Sea in September 1967, in part because they had failed to fulfill the
monthly production target for August. There, they found aggregations of
North Pacific right whales (a protected species) on the eastern coast of
Sakhalin Island, and killed 126 animals. The whaling there was
sufficiently good that they greatly exceeded the monthly production
target. The following month they continued to whale illegally, killing
many sperm whale mothers and calves. Significantly, the inspector's
report is quite explicit about the reason for this whaling:

"If the fleet had strictly followed the
'Regulations" the yearly plan target would not have been
fulfilled."

The report concludes by listing fines levied for infractions, which
involved only a small minority of the illegal catches (e.g. only one of
132 right whales taken during the whole season). From other reports, we
believe that the only infractions that were punished--and then only
occasionally--were those involving lactating females or calves, or
sometimes under-sized animals; the fact that a catch involved a species
protected by IWC does not seem to have been sufficient to trigger
punishment. Extracts from the full report, which provides an excellent
example of the problems with the Soviet inspection system, are given in
the Appendix.

The specifics of the national inspection system are not easy to
understand for people who are unfamiliar with the Soviet system of
planning and control, or with the whaling industry and its rules. To
begin with, all true information (journals and reports) was classified
as secret. None of the information or data analyses pertaining to
illegal catches could be published, either inside or outside the
country. As a result, even doctoral dissertations based on whaling data
were classified as secret (Dmitriy Tormosov, personal commun., October,
2008).

In the absence of real inspection procedures, accurate information
(such as species, length, and biological parameters) about whales caught
was freely recorded in the whaling journals on the catchers and factory
ships. As noted above, catch and biological information would be
recorded in the whale passports, in whaling journals on the processing
deck, and in scientists' journals. During the whaling season, a
whaling inspector and the Engineer of Whaling would, on a daily or
weekly basis, "clean" the catch data by deleting all protected
species or replacing them with falsified records of fin, sei, or minke
whales (23), and deleting all records of lactating females and calves as
well as undersized whales (those whose length fell below the minimum
legal length established by IWC). Whales that were legal but that were
killed in prohibited areas or time periods also disappeared from the
official record submitted to the Bureau of International Whaling
Statistics (BIWS).

Falsification of the data happened not only after, but also
occasionally during, the processing of whales. Sometimes when a whale
was a little below the legal size its length was recorded as 0.5 or 1.0
m longer (animals who fell far short of the limit were removed from the
record completely). That solved the problem of undersized whales, but it
created another in terms of production figures, which were calculated
based upon standardized length-weight tables; to compensate, larger
whales were sometimes recorded as shorter than they actually were
(Veinger, personal commun., November, 2009; Derviz, personal commun.,
October, 2008).

While these changes may appear insignificant, the resulting
scientific analyses could show a strange and disproportionate
distribution of catches by length: the absence of under-sized whales, a
spike of whales with lengths just above the legal minimum and again
fewer whales of the next size group. Furthermore, all of the other
biological parameters for these same whales were recorded exactly as
they were measured, creating even more confusion (Veinger, personal
commun., November, 2009). It was such discrepancies in the later years
of the Soviet whaling industry that led Mikhalev (2009) to discover that
falsification of catch data was occurring even after the implementation
by the IWC in 1972 of an International Observer Scheme (see below). (24)

At the end of the season all catch data would be edited in the same
way, primarily by the Engineer of Whaling and the whaling inspector but
sometimes by a special group that also included fleet scientists. All
Southern Hemisphere baleen whale catches above lat. 40[degrees]S would
be removed, as were records of lactating females and calves, protected
species, and undersized whales (with the exception of a few
"infractions" to make the data look more realistic). The data
were then sent, together with scientific reports summarizing the whaling
season, to the Ministry of Fisheries in Moscow, where the information
from the various fleets and/or land stations was coordinated prior to
submission of the falsified record to BIWS. All of these reports and
data remained classified as secret until the 1990's.

There is some disagreement among our sources regarding reporting. A
former whaling biologist and inspector stated that the fleets sometimes
sent falsified catch data directly to BIWS (Dmitriy Tormosov, personal
commun., October, 2008). However, others disagree and maintain that
everything was coordinated through the ministry in Moscow. The latter
seems more likely, given the necessity to ensure that the combined catch
totals from all fleets did not exceed the allowable quota for legal
species.

After 1972

In 1972, after many years of discussion, the IWC finally
implemented the International Observer Scheme (IOS). This was first
proposed by Norway in 1955 (IWC, 1956) and--for reasons which are now
obvious--met with considerable resistance, notably from the U.S.S.R. The
development and eventual implementation of the IOS is beyond the scope
of this paper; however, some of the wording in the IOS agreement
provides a clearer understanding of the position of independent
observers on board a whaling fleet. The full text of the Agreement
concerning an international observer scheme for factory ships engaged in
pelagic whaling in the Antarctic is given in the Appendix to the
Chairman's report of the fifteenth meeting (IWC, 1965), and
includes this language regarding the "Rights and Functions of
Observers":

"An observer shall be enabled to observe freely the operations
of the expedition ... shall be given facilities to ascertain the
species, size, sex and number of whales taken ... All reports required
and all records and data shall be made freely and immediately available
to observers for examination ..."

In light of these instructions, for many years it was widely
assumed that since introduction of the IOS in 1972, there could be no
falsification of data or illegal catches. However, this assumption has
recently been shown to be false. Mikhalev et al. (2009) presented a
paper to the IWC Scientific Committee on falsification of catch data
relating to minke whales taken after 1972 by the whaling fleet
Sovetskaya Ukraina; these catches were made despite the presence on
board of inspectors from Japan. Those authors provide an example of how
(and why) this falsification occurred:

"In the data (for example), instead of 3-4 minke whales only
2-3 were recorded, and their lengths were overstated. The reason behind
this relates to the way the system worked, which can be explained as
follows. There was a catch quota, but the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries
gave a production plan target for products that was completely
different; the latter was calculated based upon tables of weights by
length of the killed whales, but this table was unrealistically
optimistic and did not account for thin or rotten animals. The difficult
way to meet production quotas was to try to find whales of sufficient
size to make enough products. The easier way was to kill 3 minke whales
and report them as 2 larger ones; the additional whales killed but not
recorded were referred to aboard the factory fleets as "green
whales". There were also "air whales", which were whales
that were not caught but were recorded to meet catch-by-area targets, or
to reconcile the total products with a number of whales that could
conceivably make up such products. This procedure involved a fine line,
because they did not want to create a situation in which the Ministry
would set a higher target the following year based upon what was
reported in the current season".

The violations reported by Mikhalev et al. (2009) referred to only
one factory fleet, the Sovetskaya Ukraina, but they noted that it was
likely that the "practice of illegal whaling and data falsification
[after 1972] were common in other Soviet fleets as well." They also
noted that all of the IOS inspectors on Soviet whaling fleets were from
the Japanese whaling industry, and because Japan was at the time buying
whale meat from Soviet vessels, it was in the interests of some of these
inspectors to turn a blind eye to the practice. Also, on some occasions
when illegal whales were being brought to the factory ship for
processing, inspectors were invited into an officer's cabin and
treated to "hospitality" involving food and much vodka, thus
ensuring that they would not be on the processing deck when the whales
arrived. Presumably, inspectors would be shown falsified records after
the whales had been disposed of, but this aspect is not clear.

In summary, the IOS appears to have been subverted through a
combination of deception and observer complicity.

Catch Totals

It is not our intention here to report detailed catch totals for
Soviet whaling. For the Southern Hemisphere, these have been published
elsewhere (Yablokov, 1995; Zemsky et al., 1995, 1996; Yablokov et al.,
1998; Mikhalev, 2000, 2004; Clapham and Baker, 2002), although
substantially new figures are reported in Table 3. North Pacific totals
are in the process of being estimated from previously unanalyzed data
(Ivashchenko, unpublished) and will be published separately.

However, we can give a brief summary of what is known to date.
During more than 30 years of whaling in the Antarctic, the U.S.S.R.
reported 185,778 whales taken but actually killed at least 338,336, a
difference of more than 150,000 animals (Table 3, and Allison, 2010).
Large gaps remain in the record for the North Pacific. The scope of the
whaling there was smaller, but from provisional data we estimate that at
least 30,000 whales were killed illegally in this ocean, where the major
discrepancy between reported and actual catches involved sperm whales.
Overall, we judge that the U.S.S.R. killed approximately 180,000 whales
illegally, and caused a number of population crashes.

Two such crashes were particularly obvious. Soviet catches of
almost 25,000 humpback whales in the Antarctic south of Australia and
New Zealand in 1959-61 forced the closure of the shore whaling stations
in those two countries (Clapham et al., 2010). Elsewhere, Soviet catches
of right whales in the eastern North Pacific in the 1960's
(Doroshenko, 2000) devastated an already small population, which was
recently estimated through mark-recapture analysis at only 30 animals
(Wade et al., 2011). The impact of Soviet catches on other populations
has not been fully assessed.

Summary

In some respects, the Soviet whaling industry was socially quite
progressive. Its workers had access to often innovative technology;
working conditions were much of the time well controlled; and women were
given equal status to men long before such advances were made in the
West. Unfortunately, these positive characteristics were all overwhelmed
by a system of industrial planning that had little basis in realistic
resource assessments and was instead characterized by runaway
socialistic competition, inefficiency, and waste. The result was
uncontrolled whaling that inflicted major damage to some populations of
whales that had already been depleted by "legal" whaling.

It is apparent that the U.S.S.R.'s campaign was not the only
example of illegal catches or misreporting. It is now known (Kondo and
Kasuya, 2002) that Japan misreported catch data from coastal whaling
stations on two species (sperm whales, and Bryde's whales,
Balaenoptera edeni) until at least 1987. However, there is currently no
evidence that such violations of IWC regulations were conducted at the
same scale as those practiced by the U.S.S.R., or that they were the
manifestations of a planned system of deception authorized at the
highest levels of government.

For most of the post-war era, the management of commercial whaling
was a colossal failure (Holt, 2007). Although the widespread violations
conducted by the U.S.S.R. were arguably the worst example of this
mismanagement, the blame for the depletion of whale populations
worldwide cannot be laid solely at the door of the Soviet system. The
repeated failure of the IWC to acknowledge evidence of declining
populations, and the relative ease with which member states could
successfully negotiate unrealistically high quotas or block progressive
proposals, provided a recipe for disaster that was only exacerbated by
the secret actions of the U.S.S.R.. In short, the Soviet system was not
the only "devil" involved in the business of whaling.

The main task of the State Inspection [Department] was assisting
with fulfilment of the State plan targets for gross output and specific
products, and to decrease the number of violations of whaling
regulations.

For some time during the beginning of the whaling season, when no
inspectors were present, the administration of the factory ship
practiced incorrect recording of undersized whales by converting some of
them into a lower number of legal-sized whales, with a decrease in
reported weight. Inspectors warned that this practice is unacceptable,
and it ceased.

In official reports the tendency was developing towards decreasing
blubber thickness, increasing body length, and changing species. For
example: an undersized fin whale would turn into a legal-sized sei
whale; a prohibited blue whale into a fin whale; a right whale into two
humpback whales, etc.

This created significant complications in the documentation, and
reports from the fleet administration and State Inspection are
significantly different from each other in terms of total catch, and
also by species composition, sex and length.

At the end of July the decision was made to go along the Kurils
with a possibility to go deep into the Okhotsk Sea where Aleut has been
working successfully.

In early September a scout vessel was sent to survey areas around
southern Sakhalin Island, and there found aggregations of right whales.
Based on numerous requests to increase production from baleen whales,
and also to cover the unfulfilled target for August, the fleet headed
there immediately ... In one week the whole aggregation that was
stretched along the eastern coast of Sakhalin was killed ... Because of
this excellent catch the targets for products were exceeded by 47.2% and
the monthly gross output target was exceeded by 69.4%.

Conclusions for work in October:

During the month mostly unconventional [illegal under the
Convention regulations] sperm whales were killed, including a large
number of lactating females and calves ... A record was set relative to
the plan target for catches and production.

Violations during the season:

There was a constant requirement for the fleet command to increase
the catch of baleen whales ... After a categorical order to go into the
Bering Sea, the fleet hunted fin whales, the majority of which were
under-sized or lactating. In the Gulf of Anadyr the catch switched to
gray whales. Only bad weather and a large distance to the factory ship
(which was transferring products to the cargo ships) prevented
additional prohibited catches of gray whales.

The necessity to increase production from baleen whales and
compensate for the unfulfilled catch target in August forced the fleet
to hunt right whales in the middle of September.

In total, illegal whales represented 68.3% of whales by number, and
48.6% by weight ... If the fleet had strictly followed the
"Regulations" the yearly plan target would not have been
fulfilled.

First and foremost, we express our gratitude to Grigori Derviz,
Nikolai Doroshenko, Mikhail Maminov, Dmitry Tormosov, German Veinger,
Alexey Yablokov, and Vyacheslav Zemsky for generously giving us their
time to answer numerous questions about Soviet whaling. We also thank
Yuri Mikhalev for his contributions to past work on this topic; Cherry
Allison for comments and provision of updated catch data; and Gary Duker
and three anonymous referees for helpful comments on the manuscript.

(1) Catch data were actually reported to the Bureau of
International Whaling Statistics, which was the central repository for
such data under the IWC.

(2) The North Atlantic was the one ocean where the U.S.S.R. did not
operate.

(3) VNIRO stands for the Vserosiyskiy Nauchnoissledovatel'skiy
Institut Ribnogo khozyaistva i Okeanographii (All-Union Research
Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography).

(4) Note on sources: Facts and information in this paper that are
not cited or footnoted are derived by the authors from the interviews
with Soviet biologists and others mentioned in the text.

(5) The first modern whaling vessel in (pre-revolutionary) Russia
was the Mikhail (3,643 GT), purchased in 1903 by Count Heinrich
Hugovitch Keyserling together with three steam catchers for his
operation in the Russian Far East. The Mikhail was seized during the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

(6) Although Soviet whaling in the Antarctic began in 1946,
Norwegians were present on board Slava for the first two seasons; thus,
illegal catches did not begin until the 1948/49 season.

(7) Formerly Empire Venture (UK), Wikinger (Germany), and Vikingen
(Norway) (Anonymous, 1954). Slava sailed for the Antarctic on 22
December 1946 and began whaling operations in January the following
year.

(8) The term "fleet" here refers to the collection of
vessels (catchers, scout boats, etc.) working with a specific factory
ship (e.g. "the Slava fleet").

(9) The description given here is of necessity a simplification of
what was in reality an immensely complex bureaucratic system with
numerous elements and hierarchies.

(10) Gosplan is the acronym for Gosudarstvennoe Planirovanie, which
means "State Planning."

(11) "Disproportions' here means excessive production,
beyond that which would be required for distribution, or for integration
of component parts into a particular industry. For example, the intent
could be to avoid making too many wheels for automobile production
plants, beyond the number that they could use in their production target
of cars. However, it is worth noting that, in whaling,
"disproportionate' production occurred regularly, despite the
lack of demand for many of the products.

(12) Here and with quotations elsewhere, translations from the
original Russian into English were made by the senior author.

(13) Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen (1778-1852) was a
Russian naval officer who, during an expedition to circumnavigate the
globe in 1820, reportedly made the first sighting of the Antarctic
continent. See Bulkeley (2010) for an interesting discussion of how this
was later used to bolster Soviet territorial claims in the Antarctic,
with ties to the first Antarctic expedition of the Slava whaling fleet.

(14) A pood is an old Russian measure of weight equal to 16.8 kg or
37 lb. Accordingly, the increase involved here would be by 504,000 kg or
504 t.

(15) Since whales were usually too large to weigh, this figure was
based upon a standard table of length and weight for different species
by months. This table was available on each factory ship, and it was
based upon calculations by Kleinenberg and Makarov (1955) using data
from the early years of operation of the Aleut.

(16) On the Aleut the newspaper was called Harpoon, on the Slava
the Soviet Whaler, and on the Yuri Dolgorukiy the Kaliningrad Whaler.

(17) http://letopisi.ru/index.php/BajieHTHHa 5Ikobji eBHa.

(18) An example is given by Mikhalev (1997): in early November
1966, the Sovetskaya Ukraina fleet entered the Arabian Sea from the Gulf
of Aden, then proceeded north along the coast of Oman and across to the
coasts of Pakistan and northwestern India. Their catchers swept the area
and killed 238 humpback whales in 10 days.

(19) Some of the Soviet catch data were questioned by Japanese
scientists on the basis that so many whales could not be processed in
the time available (IWC, 2006, p. 151-152). However, it should be noted
that the Japanese factory ships processed whale carcasses far more
thoroughly and for many more products than did the Soviets who, in some
years or periods, took only blubber. At times of especially high catches
such as in the 1959-60 and 1960-61 Antarctic whaling seasons, more than
100 humpback whales could potentially be processed in a day if just the
blubber was stripped.

(20) Bodrov and Grigoriev (1963) list different kinds of canned
whale meat and also give recipes for sausage ingredients as well as ways
to cook whale meat and liver.

(21) In other words, undersized whales below the legal limit
established by the IWC.

(22) According to a financial report for one of the whaling fleets
for 1964, the average annual salary (without bonuses) for all personnel
was 3,600 rubles (about $8,600), and would have been considerably higher
than this for captains and harpooners.

(23) Fin, sei, and minke whales were in most cases legally
catchable, and therefore false records of these species could be used to
explain the products obtained by the factory fleets. This is why some of
the reported figures in Table 2 are higher than the actual catch.

(24) It is our impression from interviews of former biologists
that, with the exception of some post-1972 data from Antarctic fleets,
such falsification was rare; the great majority of the biological data
that are available for Soviet catches are accurate.